Cultural Content Opportunity: Traditional Games

By mongoose.kikimora

Much is made in our circles about tradition, that old cornerstone of rightoid thought since time immemorial. The rightist has perennially been occupied with the old ways, preferring atavism and well worn paths to the new and untried. Similarly, the traditional gamer sticks to outmoded and well worn ways of entertaining himself.

However, unlike the myriad of failed and decayed modes of political organization there remains more to traditional games than just something to be autopsied and learned from. Board games, table top RPGs, and traditional wargames all retain both value and uniqueness as a form of recreation, and are ripe for cultural guerrilla takeover. Naturally, there is a hierarchy of difficulty in taking space in each of these subcategories of the hobby, with board games being the hardest and RPGs being the easiest. This stems from a lower barrier to entry, board games require the manufacture of components such as game pieces, as do wargames. All an RPG requires is a word processor, baseline statistical knowledge, and the audacity to distribute a PDF.

Board games and RPGs are undergoing a broad assimilation into popular culture currently, family-oriented board games have been on the rise in recent years, while interest in RPGs has been driven by our new plastic "nerd culture." With this comes the usual, sourcebook art looking like coastal college liberal arts classrooms, disclaimers about inclusion, rules against being 'fascist,' safety tools to ensure correct ideological orientation, and of course a white liberal-dominated independent RPG design scene. The barrier of entry for Indie RPGs is only slightly higher than that of independent book publishing. One only needs to know how to write RPG mechanics using statistics, have willing friends online or IRL for testing, and a willingness to publish (something I am, among others, working on, more on that to come).

That forms a niche for us. There is a demand for RPG systems that are not D&D that are- for lack of a better term- not explicitly or implicitly gay. We shouldn't just be concerned with this because there is only an opportunity, there are other dimensions to RPGs that work in our favor. RPGs provide frameworks by which groups or 'parties' interact either via voice chat or in person and create stories together. The prioristic assumptions of both mechanics and the fictional world impact the cadence and content of this collective imaginary journey greatly. Right now that space is occupied by disgusting soy-creatures, shrieking about 'marginalization,' 'rights,' and 'fascism' along with the characteristic post-enlightenment liberal drivel.

Consider the critically acclaimed antifa larp simulator Sigmata, a humorless and uninspired tome of masochistic persecution-fanfic sparsely punctuated by lackluster mechanics. A group of edgelords could easily create a funhouse mirror version: Siegemata: Powered by Meth, where players navigate a clown world as a ramshackle team of wignats, amnats, nrx spergs, and other extremely-online types resisting the omnipresent tyranny of a conspiracy of low level government functionaries collectively known as the 'cathedral of mailmen.'

There is room for more than just the meme game. After all, who aside from our milieu possesses the requisite expertise to truly understand why the imaginations of Europeans are perennially captured by mytho-poetic fantasy? This knowledge base can be used to write engaging fantasy RPGs that facilitate the creation of our sort of stories, filling the void left by the mainstream spreadsheet and arithmetically driven games that dominate the market.

D&D along with Pathfinder and others reduce heroism to restrictive numerical calculations, more wargames with deviantart-tier OCs than quality frameworks for collective storytelling. Where explicit cultural liberalism doesn't take total hold the characteristic numerical view of life fostered by market liberalism does. Modern RPG enthusiasts are forced into a dialectic of games that focus on numbers attached to their level five guy or grotesque stories attached to their gay, or often times both.

The real crux of the future of RPG design is ideological. Now it is stymied by liberalism, and necessarily the worlds created by players must be subject to its ideology. Fiction and escapism ought not be bound by explicit ideology, especially not that which rules us. Who better to create the means for people to imagine outside of a liberal paradigm than we who pine for a world without one?